The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Q.

  Not only did they have prosthetics, they were customized. Instead of a normal metal pincher, for instance, one had a big, sharp scythe blade. One had calves covered in spikes. It was armor, weaponry. They were being outfitted like tanks. The ones being buried weren’t worth squat because they couldn’t fight anymore. That simple.

  Q.

  I didn’t have to ask. She bragged about it. General Spalding had a sister, General Coppola, Different last names, different mothers. I think that’s where their competition started, way back when they were kids, and it just never ended. They’d been feuding all their lives. Over toys, sports, class rank, boys, affection from their father. He owned one of the nation’s biggest prosthetics manufacturers. When he died, he left it to both sisters so they’d have to work together. Instead, they split the company and went on fighting: pricing, labor force, innovation. 10/23 should’ve ended everything like that. Even after the world gave us the biggest excuse to pull together, we kept fighting the same fights. Especially if you were rich. Then you had the means to make other people fight for you. I’m not innocent of it. Sun rises the next day and I’m right there, ready to do whatever General Spalding says.

  Q.

  Who knows if it was actually Sunday? Well, maybe you. You kept track, right? We got to the field of battle at the crack of dawn, but General Coppola was already there. That was my first hint that things didn’t bode well. All of Coppola’s soldiers were stretched out in a line, and even way across the field, I could see their prosthetics were wilder than ours. Big, round blades on their shoulders. Knife hands. Breastplates that looked like cheese graters—you could imagine how they’d slice the fingers off Spalding’s soldiers. Naturally, they wore blue kerchiefs, and that mattered, because there was a crowd. This was Year Four. You didn’t go outside unless you had to. Yet here were the locals, showing up.

  Q.

  My role was journalist. War correspondent. More like high-school sports reporter, I had a video camera to tape the whole thing, a bag with extra batteries and tape, a pad of paper to write on. It was pointless—it was pouring rain. But that’s war and football, right? The game goes on, regardless. Spalding gave me an assistant. It was ridiculous. A farmhand with a broken leg. He was probably lucky he hadn’t gotten buried. I think he knew it too. He kept talking about Canada. He’d heard things were better in Canada. He said it soft, like it was an unpopular opinion, Anyway, I never forgot it. It might have taken me seven years, but I got here.

  Q.

  With great pomp and circumstance, that’s how. Spalding had a speaker booming out what they used to call Jock Jams. “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.” “Whoomp! (There It Is).” There were flags, red and blue. Someone released a dove, if you can believe it. That was the signal for Super Bowl Sunday to commence. When it did—I didn’t videotape a second of it. That’s how shocked I was. It had to be close to a hundred zombies charging one another. It was unreal. They hit each other like a hundred-car pileup. Zombies don’t recoil, you know? They have no fear of taking damage. It was like watching Play-Doh people get pulled apart. And safe in the end zones, General Spalding and General Coppola sat on chairs, drinking beer and chomping snacks.

  Q.

  Forty-five minutes? Sports reporters would call it a rout, The red team got pushed way back. Spalding had to get out of her chair. She was like one of those coaches you see losing it on the sidelines, with her face all red like a little kid’s. She was screaming orders and pushing farmhands into the mud. It was over, way over, but once you’ve got zombies fighting, it’s not easy to make them stop. They’d been promised meat, right? Pretty soon, the farmhands on both sides were trying to pull the zombies apart, and that’s when I noticed the ground under everyone’s feet was moving.

  Q.

  Decent guess. My old weather guy would inform you there actually is a fault line in Tennessee. But no, not an earthquake. The rain, I’m telling you, it was torrential. The field was a swamp. Those old zombies, the ones who supposedly couldn’t fight, hadn’t been buried deep enough.

  Q.

  Like rows of crops, except instead of corn, it was hands shooting up and grabbing ankles. Then faces pushing out, mouths full of mud. The ground caved and everyone fell—farmhands, Spalding, Coppola. Blood and guts started flying, same as before, except brighter now, because these were living people being mowed up. I thought Spalding might get away, but her own soldiers got her. Something about the old zombies coming back reminded the newer zombies who they were. Their training went out the window. It felt like revenge. You can’t send people to their deaths like that. Even if they’re already dead.

  Q.

  No, we were off a ways, supposedly recording the whole thing. I guess that’s what I’m doing now, eleven years later. My assistant had a broken leg. He didn’t make it. Only one zombie came close to getting me. I’ll never forget her, She was something special. She was one of General Coppola’s mega-soldiers. You know those racing blades they give sprinters who lost their legs? She had those attached at the knee. Brand-new, lightweight carbon fiber, looked like they could last a hundred years. Made her faster than normal. She had these little hatchets attached to her wrists, so even if she didn’t get you, she got you. She almost got me, but she hesitated. It had to be my face, don’t you think? The weird thing is, I recognized this zombie, She was the one that sliced my face up in the first place! How the heck did she get there? I know it was her because she had this wrinkled old name tag soaked to her clothes. “Annie Teller,” it said, and under that, “La Brea Tar Pits.” Weirdest thing ever. Anyway, I got away and—you all right? Etta? Everything all right? Are we finished? You want to stop?

  A Shovelful of Dirt

  If the people of Old Muddy were asked to name their two most opposite residents, the Face thought they might choose fiery vigilante Greer Morgan and collected, judicious organizer Karl Nishimura. But he believed they were two sides of the same coin. Both were leaders; both knew how to inspire; both were willing to take risks and suffer consequences. The Face believed himself to be Greer’s antithesis. Where she was hurricane gales, he was Lake Ontario on a clear morning—silent, stormless.

  Even in his darkest times, like those spent with General Spalding outside Knoxville, he’d felt in his body a slow, molasses calm. He used to be the same as anyone else. Desperation, anger, embarrassment, yearning, self-doubt, all raining down inside the skull, occluding the senses. From behind a ruined face, the Face spoke only truth, and the biggest truth was the worst that could happen to him happened before 10/23, He’d been valueless.

  His interior calm granted him excellent observational abilities; he allowed himself the vanity of admitting this. He’d been the one on this recovery mission to spot the softie. He usually was. The softie’s twitches had fluttered overgrown grass, which had ticked along a rusty soup can—more than enough.

  He was also certain he’d been the only one to notice Greer capering away down Queen Street. He anticipated the reactions of the others when they noticed it. Glumness, irritation, anguish, fury. He felt those emotions too. He also felt through them, to what Greer must be feeling. Because Greer was the Face’s opposite, he held her in the highest esteem. In a world of the dead, she was more alive than anyone. Humans would need more like her if they were going to make it.

  Why she’d split was simple to guess. She’d gone looking for Muse King, He’d vanished just after Richard arrived, and Richard had stirred up things too much for anyone but Greer to devote time to finding a guy who by now was zombie feed or zombified. At the beginning, some had helped Greer search as far as Cabbagetown. Naturally, Slowtown had been skipped. You didn’t go into zombie-filled Slowtown, except on recovery jobs. The Face would never forget Nishimura’s address, delivered at Fort York’s most regal spot—the Government House Battery, better known as the Circular—when he’d celebrated that upon which they’d voted.

  All these streets are yours, he’d said, except Slowtown.

  Cheers, te
ars, hugs, kisses. For a man like the Face, wholly devoted to honesty, it felt good to witness it in others. A problem had been faced and an attempt was being made to remedy it, Slowtown’s location was more contentious. Why not stick the zombies out in Summerhill or Wychwood? Because, Nishimura explained, just as important as letting the dwindling zombies live out their last years in peace was letting them choose their place of rest, Otherwise, how could we expect them to stay put?

  Three years later, here they were, Muse King gone and Greer Morgan doing what she felt she had to do. The Face wasn’t glum, irritated, anguished, or furious about it. He wished her well. He wished everyone well, from Karl Nishimura to Etta Hoffmann to every Slowtown shuffler.

  Greer was probably headed for the Chief; Slowtown’s matriarch frequently transmitted smidgens of intelligence if properly cajoled. One day soon, some core component of the Chief would rot, and they’d find her on the sidewalk, a softie in need of recovery. Nishimura and others spoke of this eventuality despondently, but the Face believed the Chief would be replaced by another chief, maybe two. Then those two joined by another four, another six. Slowly, all the Slowtown zombies would be bold enough to stand in the open, convinced at last of their home’s permanence. In the Face’s most pleasant dreams, Queen Street looked like the friendly, bustling neighborhood of pre-10/23. You wouldn’t see anything unusual, not until you got closer.

  People ribbed him for his optimism; if nothing else, it gave them a distraction from the abhorrence of his face. He didn’t feel optimistic but realistic. A telling example: Slowtown was getting cleaner. He’d found today’s softie thanks to a rusty can in an alley. Did anyone else remember when Queen Street’s gutters had been full of cans? And silverware? And stove burners, toilet plungers, curtain runners, and computer keyboards? Old Muddy didn’t have a team of street-cleaning saints.

  The zombies were doing it themselves.

  Slowtown would never be pretty. The buildings rotted apace with their occupants; plenty of woodies, dusters, and screechers here. But the Face believed that’s why the zombies kept leaving things out, like unopened battery packs: they were tidying up. The Face heard a clink and glimpsed the rusted chain of an ankle shackle as the softie was loaded onto the stretcher. Only Etta Hoffmann seemed to notice it. Yes, the dead had plenty of reason to fear the living.

  No one on today’s recovery team seemed glad to have Hoffmann along. Even Charlie Rutkowski looked taxed to have to do her job while also serving as the librarian’s keeper. The Face felt differently. He liked Hoffmann. The way she studied his face without worry of impropriety? She was nearly as honest as he was.

  He spent most of his free time in her company. He adored the New Library. Among the most egregious of his failings as a reporter was his lack of interest in history. Now, at age fifty, the same switch he’d seen thrown in his father and grandfather was thrown in him. Suddenly all he wanted to read about was Frederick Douglass, Margaret Thatcher, and JFK. The New Library had books on all of them.

  As much as the Face reveled in learning who Nat Turner was, what the heck Watergate had been about, and when, exactly, the Korean War had taken place, it was Hoffmann’s Archive that kept him coming back. It was astonishing. The Second Dark Age had been a time of spiraling alienation. Everyone you knew, gone. The ability to find other people, gone. The voices in your head became real. Schizophrenia became a life raft.

  The Hoffmann Archive of Tales from the New World gave those years back. Hoffmann’s odd custom of cutting out her questions turned out to be a genius move, scraping the record free of nothing but pure voice. When the Face read, those voices rose around him, spirits released from blighted graves. He could feel their hands in his as they pulled him up, sharing their identifiable desires and small successes.

  After so-called Year Fucking Six, each entry was a shovelful of dirt filling a hole of history. Once Etta Hoffmann arrived at Fort York and residents began contributing Personal Histories, holes the size of General Spalding’s zombie graves were filled. The Face learned elephants and dolphins had joined the do-not-trust club, though it was still rats and dogs that forced humans to finally, fully cede the world to zombies.

  Beginning with Year Seven, even the hovels made rodent-proof with hot, stinking tar began to fester like sores across an America that otherwise beautified with awesome speed. Exiting along with humans were rapacious industry, grasping development, coldhearted advancements, voracious meat-making, and apathetic pollution. Nothing higher than the trees was constructed. Nothing faster than a horse was created. Nothing was put up to segregate one piece of land from another, no curbs, roads, gates, fences, or walls. Wildness, tortured for half a millennium, saw an opening and took it.

  The Face, same as anyone, only saw glimpses, but boy, what sights.

  Plants: they erupted like volcanos, coating the country like polychromatic lava, chasing the Face through coal country that now left its coal where it had been born. Grasses of a dozen shades of green—fern, juniper, sage, pickle, pine, seaweed—ripped across the land, swallowing industrial-park lawns and golf courses, sprouting in sidewalk clefts and street cracks, billowing into thick, swishing pelts.

  Berry bushes exploded. Sunflowers formed happy armies. Vines and ivies tore down what they could and hid everything else: traffic lights, highway signs, entire city blocks. Lilies and tulips and daffodils in unforeseen colors turned America into a painter’s palette, reminding the Face that as a child, he’d thought the actual blossoms were much prettier than what ended up on canvas. Moss spread like forest fires, and also, by the way, so did actual forest fires, with no remaining nemeses. The Face had skirted whole cities—Roanoke, Cincinnati—obliterated by unchecked blazes. What had to burn, burned, and what grew back was fecund and teeming.

  Animals: no longer overhunted, or pestled into coops, or biologically altered into helpless blobs, they scurried, scampered, and slithered into a renewed paradise recognizable to their primordial brains. The Face sometimes saw them traveling with élan down highways, packs of wolves half a mile long, clusters of spiders like blankets of steel wool, so many snakes they rippled like seawater. The Archive told of epic battles for supremacy—in the Everglades, twenty-foot alligators versus thirty-five-foot pythons—as well as quick annihilations by creatures like the Rocky Mountain locust, which returned from near extinction to peel croplands from entire states. By Year Ten, new variations of animals, if not entirely new species, were being spotted. Blond bears, blue-feathered eagles, scarlet frogs, prairie dogs with what looked like horns.

  How many times had it been said in Archive interviews? How many times had the Face thought it? Eden had returned. And right on schedule, man and woman had been exiled from it. As North America bloomed into a garden of wonders, the living could but peek from the slovenly outhouse slats of their squalid little hutches. While they coveted, zombie sentries protected nature by holding patient siege, standing outside any place they sensed humans, rolling their jaws and drooling out their decaying innards.

  Loneliness shaved to a point. The Face went eighteen months without laying eyes on another living human. Some at the fort alleged they’d gone three or four years. That had been the worst of times. The Face felt like vermin. Crawling on his belly to find plants to eat, half of which he vomited up. Hunched in a series of miserable shacks, too weak to shoo the flies drawn to his excrement. Tortured by a blooming, untouchable paradise, close enough to smell the salt of mammal snouts and the taste of pollen. It wasn’t a human existence, and maybe that was the point. Maybe humans had to live like grubs for a time to remember what exile felt like.

  The Archive confirmed his estimate that Year Eleven marked humankind’s tentative reemergence. They did it all over, all at once, as if collectively smelling a rainstorm’s end. Back in WWN days, zombie math was decisively against them. Now, the math had changed, With so few people left on Earth and most of them dutifully cremating their dead, there was no refreshing of the undead populace. Zombies began to age. Crick-crack
became a sound you understood. Those that grabbed at you did so weakly. They looked like homeless people begging for help. With mounting frequency, you found them collapsed. Like anything else, corpses had a life span, and it was beginning to end.

  All because people had done what they hadn’t done in two million years: sat still and not screwed anything up.

  Even before 10/23, Canada had tempted Americans aching for a land where guns weren’t handed out like candy and a genetic disease wouldn’t bankrupt you. Chuck Corso had been a flag-pin-wearing patriot, bellowing the national anthem louder than the guy next to him, the first WWN personality to sign up for Veterans Day events. The Face, on the other hand, noticed how every U.S. flag he saw now was filthy and shredded. Year Eleven was the year to make good on the rumor he’d heard at General Spalding’s farm.

  He made his way through Pennsylvania and western New York and crossed the border at Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power plants were gone, and the rapids roared like freed gods. They deigned to let him pass. Welcome to Canada.

  The Face heard grunts from those lifting the stretcher, Minor ones—softies never weighed much. This one looked to be of East Asian descent. The three zombies to the left, occupied with horsemeat, had once been a Black man, a white girl, and a Pacific Islander woman.

  Old Muddy reflected a similar diversity. The Face had been startled by it at first; now, anything else would feel like being deprived of an essential vitamin. There were the elderly, the middle-aged, infants. Women, men, nonbinary people, gender-fluid people, intersex, trans. Gay, straight, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, aromantic, polyamorous. Neurotypical, neurodiverse. Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, Daoists, Wiccans, Pagans. Plus lots of agnostics, even more atheists, and a single drag queen who liked to be called Lady Dee Klein. People who were physically, intellectually, psychiatrically, and/or neurologically disabled or impaired. Was all this chance? Or necessity? Nishimura once told the Face he wondered if this was why they’d been drawn to Toronto, sometimes called the planet’s most multicultural city. A new world could not look like the old world.